-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 > They have two jobs: to monitor foreign communication, and to secure > domestic communication against foreign monitoring. > > http://www.nsa.gov/about/mission/ > > The argument for trusting NSA/NIST crypto standards has historically > been that weak crypto would make the first job easier but the second > job harder. We now have to re-examine that argument and ask whether > the NSA has been gambling with the security of US commercial, > government and military data (up to top secret level - the highest > level that relies on NSA/NIST-published standards) in order to further > its surveillance mission. > That has always been an inherent conflict. It is, however, difficult to decouple the cryptography and cryptanalysis expertise.
Interestingly, with the DES standard there were some changes introduced by NSA that were thought at the time to be backdoors, since they were never justified. Many years later, the community realized that these changes made some obscure attacks less likely. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAlIp7mMACgkQEwFPdUjsHjAkCACg6eajrd6sSr2Gz3aw0Q8dJQ2y fmoAoNHILC4gjgQV9tS4d/QRg1KupU3g =lr8i -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Liberationtech is a public list whose archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
